Europe

PV Tech’s preliminary analysis of global PV manufacturing capacity expansion plans in the third quarter of 2016, highlight an absence of China based solar cell and module manufacturers making new announcements for either domestic or overseas production.

Swedish CIGS thin-film equipment supplier Midsummer said it had secured a follow-on order from an undisclosed customer for its flexible CIGS thin-film process tool.

There is a need for a pan-European investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, to give the solar industry a unified legal body to help it fight retroactive cuts and other policy U-turns across the continent, according to a European trade group.

Fully digitized solar power plants will be the next focus for improving efficiencies in the solar PV industry according, to Guoguang Chen, general manager of inverter manufacturer Huawei’s Smart PV Europe Business.

Solar mounting systems specialist S:FLEX GmbH said it had established a new branch office in Jordan to coordinate a growing demand in the MENA region for PV rooftop systems.

Leading PV manufacturing equipment supplier Meyer Burger Technology announced a major restructuring plan to become more flexible to market dynamics by lowering its operating cost base by CHF 50 million per annum and reducing its workforce by around 16% by the end of 2016.

‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JA Solar said it had withdrawn from the European Union’s Minimum Import Price (MIP) agreement.

Independent global testing and certification body UL (Underwriters Laboratory) has acquired renewable energy engineering services and support firm, AWS Truepower for an unspecified sum.

European scientists have teamed from imec, KIT and ZSW to fabricate a thin-film solar module (lab) stack made up of perovskite and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) with a conversion efficiency of 17.8%, which surpasses the highest efficiencies of separate perovskite and CIGS modules.

The solar centric political campaigning group EU ProSun, established by integrated PV module manufacturer, SolarWorld, has condemned China and Chinese module manufacturers for causing SolarWorld to make 500 ‘temporary’ workers at its manufacturing plants in Germany, redundant.